Copywriter Or Optimizer? The SEO Dilemma

Search engine optimization is the backbone of any web-based marketing strategy. Without an effective, targeted SEO your website risks remaining a Sleeping Beauty. Brilliantly contrived but dead to the web world. Search engine optimization will focus primarily on how search engines work, which are more relevant, if any, to your strategy, what consumers/web users search for when approaching your business sector, and where, and why do they choose so.

Creating an effective SEO strategy requires a profound knowledge of how search engines work, coupled with a good working knowledge of marketing practices, in particular of those most effective in your business sector.

Once the strategy is clear and approved, it needs to be put into practice. The website in other words needs to be optimized for search engine purposes. Optimizing a website requires almost always the editing of its content, HTML and related coding. The objective is to improve search relevance through strategic use of keywords, to increase the site’s relevance to search engines and to disable barriers to the engines’ indexing activities. Promoting a site to raise the number of backlinks is another SEO tactic.

All these tasks are technical and they require a combination of content writing ability and internet technique familiarity.

For the former, the standard copywriter’s bag of tricks is necessary, and then some. This is because a website’s content needs always to be both engaging for the reader and relevant for search engines, and the two do not automatically fit in together. The need to maximise keyword density, the placement of keywords and SEO text on the page, the careful inclusion of as many backlinks as possible without annoying the reader…all these technical elements end up straitjacketing content writing. In particular, they tend to produce content that may be technically useful but that puts people off. And this is, in the long run, a downside that website traffic through search engines may not be able to offset.

So the priority in picking a web content writer is to make sure that he or she is aware of these conflicting issues and capable of working his or her way around them. If an experienced content writer with a good track record is not available, then the copywriter of choice will benefit from working together with an SEO optimizer.

This is a professional who is well versed in SEO techniques and also understands at least a modicum of marketing practice so as to be aware of the pitfalls of creating content that is “sterile”, plain and irksome to read. Working alongside the copywriter the SEO optimizer will not only rework content but also, crucially, work on the site’s code to generate pages that will be positively viewed by search engines. It is an often thankless task, especially because search engines designers very rarely reveal the algorithmic complexities of their engines, fearing “black hat” SEOs and vying to stay competitive on a very tough marketplace. But it is also a process where you can learn fast from experience, and most content writers can quickly acquire the skills needed not only to write engaging content, but also to create copy that is search engine savvy.

This post is written by Mark Jenkins and he works at CouponAudit as a writer, where thousands of valid and working online coupons for different stores are available including but not limited to orbitz promo code and various other online stores.